Interspatial Shift Drive
Interspatial Shift Drives, more commonly referred to as Jumpdrives '''or '''ISDs, are technologically advanced starship propulsion systems that allow starships to travel great astronomical distances at superluminal speeds by travelling through jumpspace, via entry and exit through Interspace in a process called "Jumping." Jump drives are used by all races and governments with interstellar colonies and territories, as the access to faster-than-light travel that jumpdrives provide is essential to establishing colonies in other star systems and form the backbone of any interstellar society. Function Jumpdrives operate based on the existence of other "planes" or "spaces" of reality intertwined with our own. The drives manipulate incredibly tiny amounts of exotic matter to produce "interspatial shift fields" and expand them to envelop the starship they are installed on. Regular matter entering this field then transitions over to a plane of reality called Interspace, where distances are distorted based on the speed of an object travelling through it, but are also linked to distances in our own plane of reality. The faster a transitioning starship moves while in Interspace, the shorter distances will become for it, effectively allowing it's distance travelled in realspace to increase drastically with speed. This unstable phenomenon means that Interspace is often used as a acceleration and deceleration medium when transitioning between realspace and the Jump, or for travelling between two locations within a single star system. If the ISD is given enough energy, it can make a second transition of the field into a higher-energy plane of reality, called extradimensional jumpshift space, more commonly known as jumpspace, where distances in relation to realspace by an absolute factor, also known as the Shift Factor, of 33,330,000, meaning any distance a starship travels in Jumpspace will be 33,333,000 times larger in the real plane, allowing for extremely rapid faster-than-light traversal of space. When a jump is nearing completion, the drive often transitions to Interspace to allow the starship to decelerate prior to returning to the real plane, otherwise a direct exit from Jumpspace could not only be damaging to the drive, but could result in being millions of kilometres away from the intended destination. To calculate a ship's realspace velocity in comparison to it's jumpspace velocity, simply multiply the jump velocity by 33,330,000; for example, a ship travelling at 10km/s in the jump would be travelling at 1112 c were it in the real plane. Jumpdrives do not actually provide any physical acceleration or motion for the starship they are affixed to - only the spatial transitions. This means that a starship capable of accelerating faster than another in realspace will also be able to travel faster in both Interspace and Jumpspace. An object's speed, however, is limited by the stability of the shift field the drive produces. Primitive, damaged, or faulty ISDs can be unable to produce completely stable shift fields, and reaching high velocities in the field can result in the field collapsing and any vessel within it is violently and suddenly forced back into realspace. Dangers Due to the high energies they require and physically unstable phenomena they exploit, there are some dangers related to the use of jumpdrives. One of the most common is the gradual de-stabilisation of the fields they produce when active for long periods of time, which can lead to a sudden and violent ejection of the travelling vessel into realspace, which can often critically damage both the drive and the ship, sometimes leading to the ship becoming stranded in interstellar space with no method of FTL travel. Physical damage to a drive can also lead to potentially devastating consequences. A ruptured jumpdrive can explode violently if it's exotic matter containment systems are damaged, with the reactions between this matter and the surrounding space causing a massive energy release that can potentially destroy the entire ship that it's installed on. Category:Technology Category:Jump Drives